


Don't Go Into the Woods

by ncfan



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Monstrous Transformations, POV Female Character, POV Original Character, light body horror, post-season 3 finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-22 14:40:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17061659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: You never know what you're going to find in the woods at night. Sometimes you find more than you bargained for.





	Don't Go Into the Woods

You never know what you’re going to find in the woods at night.

There was a certain _joy_ to being out in the woods at night. Yes, Keren had heard over and over again the dangers of being out alone at night. According to her mother, there was a serial-killing rapist lurking behind every tree, and a bit more plausibly, there were snakes, feral dogs, and deer to worry about. (The deer would surprise you, every time, with just how much damage they could do to you.) Well, ‘worry’ was a strong word for it; Keren had never worried much about the things that were actually out in the woods. This wasn’t deep, dense forest. They were barely out of the suburbs, out here, and it wasn’t like she was just stumbling around in the dark without even a torch.

It was just… Keren didn’t know what it was. The air smelled cleaner when it was dark. Whereas in the daylight she could smell smoke and gasoline from the nearby motorway, could smell trash rotting away in a ditch somewhere, at night, these things were muted at night. What held sway at night was the green smell of growing things and pleasantly earthy petrichor.

It smelled better at night, and the shadows grew up in such a way as to make everything seemed different. That… Keren wouldn’t deny she got a chill when the shadows twisted a familiar shape into something strange, when she looked at something in the dark and there was that moment when she thought it was something threatening. Then the adrenaline birthed by fear morphed into something altogether joyful, and she delved deeper and deeper into the forest. She wasn’t rich. It wasn’t like she could afford to have too many expensive hobbies, let alone ones that would give her that kind of adrenaline rush (Even if it was only momentary). This was how she got her kicks.

Keren kept hoping she’d spot an owl while she was out here. She never did. To be honest, she hardly ever saw any wildlife out here at night, beyond the odd rabbit. She was, as far as she could tell, alone. Whatever else lived in the forest, it didn’t reveal itself to her.

Tonight, there was a faint, whispery breeze to accompany her as she wandered through the forest. That whispering voice and the encouragement it provided soon saw Keren stepping off of the hard-packed trail and wading through tall grass and tangled, thorny bushes. She scanned her surroundings with her torch, eyes narrowed. _Which way to go, which way…_

Off in the distance, the diffused light of her torch caught on something that glinted and sparkled in the dark.

Good enough.

As Keren walked through the wood, the ground sloped gradually downwards, a hill and a hollow she knew well. She’d first found this place during the day, choked with weeds and plastic food wrappers, and much preferred it at night, when, for whatever reason, the food wrappers were harder to spot. But… Keren frowned. Was it her imagination, or was something different? The smell of damp earth was stronger than it had ever been here, and the air in the hollow felt… weird. She didn’t even know how else to describe it; it was just weird.

Keren’s frown deepened. _Let’s just see what there is to see._

She picked her way down the uneven slope of the hollow until she came to the bottom. She saw what there was to see, nestled among the weeds and the gorse bushes and the plastic food wrappers. And she froze.

What emerged out of the darkness was a sight utterly at odds with this barely-out-of-the-suburbs forest, so Keren stared at it for a long time, trying to make her brain work and truly _process_ what she was seeing. After a few seconds of helpless staring, she could make her brain work again, and it finally began doing something with the sensory input from her eyes.

The thing that had caught the light of her torch was a heavy iron chain. And what that chain was attached to was something Keren’s half-paralyzed brain took nearly a full minute to recognize as a coffin. Pale yellow was the wood, with a coarse grain, though Keren didn’t recognize it. The lid was viciously scored with deep scratches that bristled with long splinters whose points glinted in the torchlight. _Should wood glint like that?_ Keren wondered, her heart beating arrhythmically. She squinted at the scratches. It looked… It almost looked as if there were words there, but the scratches were too numerous, and if anything was written in the wood, she couldn’t make it out.

There was something off about the wood. Keren couldn’t figure out quite what it was, but something about it was wrong. Something about it was unlike what wood should have been. It wasn’t that it looked like plastic, or stone, or anything else. It just… didn’t look like real wood.

Fuck, she’d found a coffin in the woods and _that_ was what she got hung up on.

Keren stared at it, half-paralyzed, half-mesmerized. She’d… found a coffin in the woods. Well, what was she supposed to do? Call the police? This wasn’t anywhere near a road, so someone had to put this here _deliberately_. Her hand wandered toward her jacket pocket, before she remembered she’d left her phone on the charger.

The next place her hand wandered towards, absently, almost of its own accord, was the lid.

Her fingertips almost brushed the rough maybe-wood before Keren’s mind snapped back to awareness and she jerked her hand away. She thought uneasily about fingerprints and forensic evidence, thought even more uneasily about police cars pulling up outside of her rental and a trip that ended in a windowless room with a cold metal table. She thought about the fact that she’d never decided that she wanted to have a look at what was inside of the coffin.

Keren turned abruptly and stumbled away from the coffin, up the side of slope out of the hollow. She didn’t know what to do about the coffin, but she knew she needed to get back home, somewhere there were locked doors between her and exposure, somewhere there was a cricket bat between her and anything that might hurt her.

The walk home was no longer than it had ever been from this part of the woods. It didn’t magically stretch out to miles and miles of dark forest, with trees she’d never seen before popping up out of the darkness. She even found the trail without much trouble. And the whole time she was walking home, Keren felt as though there was someone walking behind her. Not close, of course, never close, but she had the feeling anyone gets when they’re not alone, that sense of sharing a space with someone else. Whenever she turned round and shone the torch where she’d just been walking, it showed only empty forest, and when she turned back in the right direction, she was walking a little faster than before.

-0-0-0-

Keren didn’t call the police about the coffin. By the next morning, she was half-convinced she’d dreamt up finding that strange, yellow coffin at the bottom of a trash-filled hollow. After all, Keren had found a lot of weird shit in the woods over the years—she’d found a store mannequin that had been crudely sawn in half lengthways, once—but a coffin was on a completely different level. She wasn’t even sure how to _process_ that, let alone do something about it. So Keren spent half her time thinking it was a dream, and half her time just trying not to think about it at all.

Okay, maybe a _bit_ more than half her time was spent trying not to think about it at all.

She went to work. Went about the business of living her life. She stopped going out into the woods at night, and found that it wasn’t as much of a trial to give that up as she might have thought—though that could have just been due to the fact that it had been pouring down rain nearly all day for the past few days; there were few things she hated more than the sensation of sopping wet clothes clinging to her skin.

It rained for days, gray sheets that softened the earth and muddied the roads and, for a few short hours one morning, cut Keren’s driveway off from the street. There was no real force to it; there wasn’t accompanied by the rolling growl of thunder or the electric flash of lightning. There wasn’t even any wind. The rain just came down, like water from a watering can.

Against this gray, wet backdrop, the dreams started.

Keren had never had a problem with recurring dreams; at least, she didn’t think she’d had. She’d never really been _able_ to remember her dreams, beyond a few vague impressions that evaporated with the dawn. So when Keren’s dreams suddenly became vivid things that dogged her all through the day, she couldn’t help but take notice.

And the thing was, she couldn’t actually remember any of those dreams in their entirety. What she retained were images and sounds like movie stills and audio clips, but it was enough to form a strong impression.

She caught herself looking over her shoulder behind her far more often than she ever used to before. When she went jogging in the neighborhood during brief reprieves from the downpour, the pounding of her heart eventually translated itself from exertion into white-hot adrenaline that drove all rational thought from her mind and saw her tearing home like a hind pursued by a hunter. The dull, tapping thud of rainwater hitting wood was unbearable to her ears.

People at work kept asking her what was the matter with her. They said she looked terrible. They said she acted like she was expecting a monster to jump out from behind a display counter and grab her. Keren didn’t know what to tell them. She didn’t know what to say at all.

When the tapping started, Keren wasn’t sure if she was awake or not. Wasn’t sure what to attribute the gentle tapping on her windows and her walls to. Whenever she went outside to look, she found herself alone, and the cold, heavy handle of her metal torch didn’t reassure her as much as it ought to have. She’d look into the forest beyond her little house and fancy she saw the shadows shift. One evening, her torch caught on something either very far off or very small, something that flickered and danced in the dark like fireflies, though the season for them was over now. It would have been pretty, if not for the way those points of light, closely clustered together, eventually focused on Keren standing by her back door. It was all Keren could do not to let out a whimper as she hurried back inside, locking and bolting the door behind her as she went.

 _What’s happening to me_? she wondered, staring up at her dark bedroom ceiling. _Where did this even come from? One moment, I was okay, and now I’m jumping at every shadow?_

There came a sharp _tap, tap, tap_ on her window. Keren yanked her duvet over her head and tried desperately to ignore it. Tried to sleep.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

Keren was pretty sure she’d dreamt the laugh.

-0-0-0-

It was the next night when Keren finally reached her breaking point. This wasn’t like her; she’d become something like a prisoner in her own home so quickly that she’d barely recognized what was happening to her. And she didn’t know exactly _why_ it was happening to her, but it had something to do with the chained yellow coffin. It _had_ to have something to do with that coffin. She was _fine_ until the night she first found the coffin. _That_ was when everything had changed.

Keren nodded firmly to herself as she headed out her back door, heavy metal torch in hand. She’d go out and find the hollow where the coffin had been dumped. If it wasn’t there anymore, she’d put it from her mind and go on with her life. If it was still there, she’d call the police, lead them to the hollow, and _then_ put it out of her mind and go on with her life. It wasn’t as complicated as all that.

It wasn’t complicated, but neither was it easy, once Keren was actually out in the woods, to put her unease from her mind. Keren’s blood pounded in her ears as she walked down the trail that led into the woods, and even the slightest noise had her freezing in her tracks and swinging the torch towards the source, eyes frantically scanning the undergrowth before her, convinced she’d see… she didn’t know what. She didn’t know what she was expecting to see.

_It was probably just a rabbit or a cat, you idiot. Keep your head on straight and you’ll be fine._

The walk back to her house after she’d found the coffin had not felt like a long one, for all that Keren had been convinced then, as well as now, that there was something else in the woods with her. But this, this was a _long_ walk. The darkness wasn’t any more dense than it had been when she had last ventured out into the woods after sundown, but there was more in it this time. Keren was aware of sounds she had never picked up on before when she went into the woods after dark—snapping twigs, the sounds of birds crying out, and what sounded like weasels squealing. A richer array of sounds than what she heard during the day, but she no longer relished such things.

 _It’s just one more night. After tonight, it’ll be over. I’ll be… I won’t be…_ like _this anymore._

The prospect of going back to normalcy was enough to keep Keren moving forward, enough to keep her from turning tail and heading back to the house, where she could hide under her bedcovers until morning. It’s amazing what the human mind can be persuaded to tolerate, if there is an endpoint in sight, and this was far from the worst thing possible, or so she kept telling herself.

Leaves crunched under her feet.

Twigs snapped somewhere out of sight.

Far off, Keren heard something she thought one moment was a laugh, thought the next was the sound of a car horn.

It was taking longer to find the hollow than she had thought it would. Keren had stepped off the path a while ago, and woods she had thought she knew seemed different than what they had been just a week prior. Everything looked the same. All the trees had an air of sameness to them despite visibly belonging to different species. Every bush that had a plastic wrapper stuck in its branches looked the same. Everything she looked at, she expected to see something standing behind it, staring back at her with eyes that flickered and danced like fireflies out of season.

Keren was just reaching the base of a hill where the trees were a bit thinner, just wondering if she shouldn’t head back for home and try to find the coffin in daylight like a _normal_ person looking for a coffin in the woods would (if such a person even existed), when she saw something that made her freeze in her tracks.

Not often did Keren run into other people in the woods at this time of night, though it did happen, sometimes. It was usually harmless insomniacs or harmless drunks, though she had once run across a couple who thought a forest was the perfect place for a late-night tryst. (She sometimes wondered about that couple. Wondered how many infections they’d gotten from having sex in the middle of a fucking _forest_.) She ran across other people in the forest at this time of night rarely enough that she was always startled when she came across another person. It always made her freeze for a moment, even when everything about them was commonplace.

This…

What she saw now was a truly strange sight, just as much as odds with the world as she knew it as that coffin had been.

The trees were thinner here, and the clouds had cleared enough that the moon, nearly full, shone pale light down over the hill. What it revealed was the outline of a person walking along the crest of the hill, dragging something large and bulky behind them in one hand. It was, Keren realized after squinting at it for a long moment, a large sack. It bulged in odd places and squirmed weakly; she could barely drag her eyes away from it long enough to look back at the person who was dragging it along behind them.

They were tall, and thin. Despite the sack being so very large, they pulled it along with what, in the dark, seemed to be relatively little effort. And on their head… This was the strangest thing, the relatively minor weird thing to top several nights of weirdness; on their head, they were wearing what Keren would have sworn was a reindeer antler headband.

Or maybe it wasn’t a headband at all.

Because suddenly, too fast, _far_ too fast, the figure’s gaze snapped to Keren at the base of the hill, and the way those antlers moved…

Well, that wasn’t Keren’s biggest concern.

They stiffened. They let go their grip on the feebly squirming sack. They ran towards Keren at terrifying speed.

And heart in her throat, a scream poised on her lips, Keren ran into the dark.

She wasn’t shining her torch anywhere but at the ground; she wasn’t watching where she was going at all. It was a miracle Keren hadn’t put her foot in a rabbit hole and snapped her ankle like a twig. Keren wasn’t thinking about that. She wasn’t thinking about anything at all beyond the most basic need of any human being: the need to stay alive, the need to get as far away as possible from what meant to kill her.

She had to get home. Had to get to her house where she could lock herself in and call for help, but she had been running blindly and not looking where she was going, and when she finally thought to look for the trail, she couldn’t find it.

 _I have to get away. It doesn’t matter where to; I just have to get away_.

And so Keren tried to get away, just ran and ran and ran until her legs were aching from over-exertion and her lungs were screaming and her mind was just a single track of _runrunRUN_. She ran, and ran, until she found herself running down a slope carpeted with long grass and thorny bushes and plastic food wrappers.

Here was the reason she’d left her house tonight in the first place. Here was the thing she had ultimately risked her life to find.

The coffin was as Keren remembered it, yellow and scratched and constructed of something that strongly resembled wood, and yet gave the impression of not actually _being_ wood. The chains glinted in the light of her metal torch. But something had changed.

The lid was open.

It was possible that the coffin could serve as a hiding place, so Keren barreled down the hollow towards it. But as she got closer to the coffin, her torchlight illuminated more of the interior, and oh, there was something _seriously_ wrong with this picture.

This had been a night for bizarre things. Things that didn’t make any sense, things that absolutely should not be happening. This was the new winner for the category of ‘strangest thing,’ not even an hour after the last winner had taken the top spot. Where the torchlight hit, there should have been the yellow bottom of the coffin’s interior. Instead, Keren saw rough-hewn stone steps, and darkness that spoke of things like labyrinths and abysses so far beneath the surface of the sea that sunlight would never grace them. It was impossible—but so was what she had seen at the top of that hill.

She heard footsteps behind her.

Keren descended the stairs.

Here, there were stairways that stretched into nothing and passageways that came from nowhere. They all rebounded on themselves eventually—you could walk for hours and find you’d not progressed more than a few feet. It was utterly dark beyond the shallow pool of light cast by Keren’s torch, and her nose was filled with an overpowering smell of dry and dusty earth.

This was a coffin. It was a world within a coffin. It made sense that the earth would smell dead within.

Keren ran and ran and ran, but eventually she had to stop to take a breath. Her lungs felt as if they were on fire, and there was shooting pain in her chest that begged her to double over or just lie down on the cold stone beneath her feet. She shone her torch around, and realized with a sick thrill that she could see no sign of the doorway by which she had entered.

Then, a hand lit on her shoulder. It was, if Keren had to guess, a woman’s hand. It was long-fingered, blistered, and filthy. The fingernails were torn and jagged, so caked with dirt that they were practically black. One of the blisters oozed a pale, runny pus.

“ _Shhhhh_ ,” her hunter whispered in her ear, as the torch went out.


End file.
